THE SKY LINE DESIGNING DOWNTOWN How wzll so many people with so many different ideas agree on the new proposals jòr the Wórld Trade Center site? T he first six proposals for rebuilding the World Trade Center site were unveiled last J at a press conference in Federal Hall, on Wall Street. John Beyer, of Beyer Blinder Belle, the architectural firm that drew up most of the plans, sat on a platform in the hall's grand marble rotunda, as did Louis Tomson, the pres- ident of the Lower Manhattan Devel- opment Corporation. Alexander Garvin, the L.M.D.C.'s head of planning, stood at the back of the room, and when the presentation was over he slipped out a side door. He knew the proposals were a disaster: six variations on the same theme, none of which rose to the his- toric occasion. The designers seemed to be concerned primarily with arranging eleven million square feet of office space around Ground Zero. Garvin's absence from the stage wasn't entirely by choice. He had lost several battles about the direction the plans were to take-mainly with the Port Author- ity; which built the original World Trade Center and still owns the land and wants to restore the commercial space that was blown to bits on September 11th. But Garvin also had arguments with his col- leagues at the L.M.D.C. Louis Tom- son, a longtime associate of Governor Pataki, favored working with the Beyer plans. Two members of the corporation's board, Roland Betts, founder of the Chelsea Piers sports complex in Man- hattan, and Billie Tsien, an architect, were less enthusiastic. "I felt really un- comfortable when those schemes were publicly presented, and I wondered why I was on this board," Tsien told me. A few days after the press conference in Federal Hall, a public meeting was held at the J avits Center to hear a broad range of responses to the new proposals. The meeting took place on a sweltering Saturda but nearly five thousand peo- ple showed up anywa They sat at round tables and answered questions on elec- tronic instant-polling devices. They were 62 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 6, 2003 BY PAUL GOLDBER.GER. asked to evaluate the six schemes as ex- cellent, good, adequate, or poor, and in every case the largest number of votes fell into the category of poor. When the participants were asked to select the fea- ture of the plans that bothered them most, the highest number of votes went to "Schemes not ambitious enough." The second most troublesome thing, ac- cording to the poll, was the excessive amount of office space that all the plans included. The L.M.D.C. had been saying all along that the plans were only concep- tual and shouldn't be viewed as if they were finished designs, and that a long period of public dialogue was expected, but it was hard to have a dialogue about something that everyone seemed to hate. Daniel Doctoro the city's deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding, who shared Garvin's reserva- tions about the plans, made no attempt to hide his delight that they had been so roundly rejected. "It strikes me that what occurred today has been profound," he told the crowd. He was reminded, he said, of Abraham Lincoln's "Right makes might" speech in 1860 at Cooper Union. Like that occasion, the event at the J av- its Center would change history: The meeting at the Javits Center was, in fact, an emblematic event in the his- tory of city planning, but it could per- haps be better compared to the time, in 1968, when the author and criticJaneJa- cobs destroyed the records of a public hearing about the expressway that Rob- ert Moses wanted to run across Lower Manhattan. Jacobs's act of civil disobe- dience-those were the days when peo- ple burned draft cards to protest the Vietnam War-was intended to stop a big project. For the next generation, most public activism in the realm of city plan- ning was intended to prevent things like highways and sewage plants and tall buildings from being built. Since you don't get reëlected by proposing unpop- ular things, over the years fewer and fewer big public projects were initiated in New York That is one of the reasons the original plans for Ground Zero were so cautious, and so bland. Nobody wanted to be Robert Moses anymore. A lex Garvin didn't want to be Rob- ert Moses, either, but in the course of the day at the J avits Center he began to act like a man who realized that some- thing was happening that might save his job. He wandered around the floor, lis- tening to conversations and watching the polling results flash onto screens high up in the center of the room. "Five thousand people in a room arguing pas- sionately about urban design!" he said. "This fills me with hope." It was clear that the six plans would probably have to be junked altogether, and Billie Tsien and Roland Betts soon emerged as the prime movers in an effort to shift the direction of the process. They encouraged the rest of the L.M.D.C. board to listen to Alex Garvin. He had no power to make the Port Authority change its position, but he could do something to erase the memory of the six discred- ited schemes. Garvin, who is sixty-one and has spent most of his career teach- ing planning at Yale and working in city government, is a trained architect whose first job was working for Philip Johnson. WIth the support of Betts and Tsien, he decided to play the architecture card. He set out to make the L.M.D.C., at least for a few months at the end of 2002, into the most conspicuous architectural pa- tron in the world. It was a shrewd decision, because it moved the planning process to an arena that the Port Authority had tradI- tionally shown little interest in. With the help of New York New Visions, a group of architects who had been mak- ing proposals for establishing guidelines at Ground Zero, Garvin announced late last summer that the L.M.D.C. wanted